UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 229-iiHouse of COMMONSMINUTES OF EVIDENCETAKEN BEFOREENVIRONMENTAL AUDIT COMMITTEE
ADAPTING TO CLIMATE CHANGE
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Transcribed by the Official Shorthand Writers to the Houses of Parliament: W B Gurney & Sons LLP, Hope House, Telephone Number: 020 7233 1935
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the Environmental Audit Committee
on
Members present
Mr Tim Yeo, in the Chair
Mr Martin Caton
Martin Horwood
Mark Lazarowicz
Dr Desmond Turner
Joan Walley
________________
Memorandum submitted by TRL
Examination of Witness
Witness: Dr Ian S McCrae, Senior Technical Manager, Energy, Emissions and Air Pollution Group, Transport Research Laboratory, gave evidence.
Q27 Chairman: Good morning Dr McCrae; welcome to the Committee. Thank you for coming in and also for being here a few minutes earlier as we despatched our private business very quickly today. Can I start off with a general question? The UK is not meeting either its own targets or the EU targets for air quality; how far do you think that the level of air pollution here is caused by transport?
Dr McCrae: Transport
is a significant source of air pollution in the
Q28 Chairman: Are those two that you have just mentioned the main sources of pollution from transport?
Dr McCrae: They are the most important ones in my mind in terms of our ability not to meet the European limit values. Of those, in terms of the health impact, I would probably bias towards the particulate matter as being the most important in terms of the health impacts inasmuch as particulate matters have no safe level of health protection and, therefore, it is a matter of balancing risk and cost and things.
Q29 Chairman: In the briefing that we had from the National Audit Office in preparation for this inquiry, I was quite startled by the extent to which life expectancy is reduced by poor air quality; it is quite a substantial cause of people dying a significant amount sooner than they otherwise might. It is not an issue that gets as much attention as I would have thought it deserved given that circumstance. Do you think we understand well enough how vehicle emissions actually contribute to poor air quality?
Dr McCrae: I think we understand that road transport and other forms of transport are mobile sources. There are very high proportions of traffic and movement in urban areas where people live and, therefore, there is a link between emissions from transport sources and exposure of populations to particular pollutants. My own feeling is that some of the messages on the health impacts are confused and particularly confused in terms of the public. If we want to have people making changes in their behaviour - which is what we need to improve our emissions from the transport sector - we need to have that message very much more clearly defined. As to your statement on the number of deaths associated with air pollution, I find those figures very confusing and I do not really know whether it is to do with the reduction of an average person's life by a few months which does not seem so important or individuals who are very susceptible or who have existing diseases whose life expectancy is reduced by many years, and that is quite a different parameter. I think the whole issue of exposure is something that we poorly understand and is poorly researched and poorly financed. The monitoring networks in the United Kingdom are pretty impressive, there are a large number of monitoring stations in a large number of environments, but we use that data collected from the monitoring stations to characterise exposure and then we seem to miss the fact that most of us spend most of our lives indoors and, therefore, what we measure in a street or an urban background situation does not reflect the exposure or the dose that we experience as we go through our normal lives.
Q30 Mark Lazarowicz: To what extent do you think the effects of poor air quality are understood across government?
Dr McCrae: The Department of Health and the Health Protection Agency has a very important group through the work with COMEAP and they have been generating over the last 20 years a whole series of reports that really go into quite a lot of detail on the processes of emissions and health impact. They are widely read and widely responded to by government departments. The issue I always have with government departments, of course, is that they could always be more joined-up and that goes almost without saying. However, I think that is a weakness in government departments; often the health part is in one part, transport is in another part and the environment is in another part. Really to look at improving the environment, particularly air pollution, we do need this multi-disciplinary approach to any particular solution.
Q31 Mark Lazarowicz: Are there any areas where there are policy drivers which are tending to worsen air pollution and air quality which are, as it were, working against a joined-up approach and working against those departments which are trying to reduce air pollution?
Dr McCrae: I think there is always a tension in the two agendas, one being the climate change agenda - which is predominantly looking at the reduction in carbon emissions - and the agenda for improving local air quality. There is a tension there and there is a compromise between the two disciplines. I think there are many cases where we seek to improve local air quality. In my own experience, the early introduction of the three-way catalyst, for example in motor vehicles, in the early development of its technology had something like a fuel consumption increase of a few per cent and that goes against the agenda that we have for climate change where we want to see that moving in the opposite direction.
Q32 Mark Lazarowicz: Are there policies which are moving towards action which is actually detrimental to air quality? One thinks about certain areas, about road development, for example, or indeed looking at other departments' planning policies, for example; are they taking air quality issues into sufficient account?
Dr McCrae: A lot of
my work is looking at the impacts from particular road developments and we can
see there the work of the Highways Agency - they look after the high speed road
network as an asset for the
Q33 Mark Lazarowicz: Are there any ways in which information and resources can be shared more effectively between Defra, local authorities, universities and other government departments, for example?
Dr McCrae: I am sure there are and, stepping slightly aside from that, one of the key things we want to see an improvement to in local air quality is communication, and I feel it is communication with the public. What that has to be is messages which are clearly understood and allow the public to act in small ways that could contribute to the improvement in air quality. That message has to be brought forward from integrated policies across government departments.
Q34 Mark Lazarowicz: It is the UK, of course, which is obliged to meet EU standards but most of the departmental work here is only dealing with the situation in England. Are you aware of what measures or steps have been taken to ensure that the devolved administrations also comply with the EU policies? Obviously it is the UK that would be responsible for any breaches on the part of those devolved administrations.
Dr McCrae: The
Q35 Dr Turner: Emission standards keep tightening, particularly European standards. How effective do you think this has been in improving roadside air quality?
Dr McCrae: A few years ago it was often thought that the introduction of technology on motor vehicles and all forms of transport would be the solution to air quality issues; they we would see a continuing reduction in allowable limits for motor vehicles and that would result in an improvement in air quality. That reliance on technology has probably been shown to be not particularly robust and what we see now is that many forms of technology operate quite differently in different environments. A technology on a heavy good vehicle that may well be effective on a high speed road network may not perform as well in an urban environment. That is quite important because that is where most of the population are and that is where the exposure can be a real issue.
Q36 Dr Turner: Do you think these technology failings, in a sense, are part of the explanation of why we have not seen greater improvements?
Dr McCrae: I think it goes a long way to explaining some of the trends that we have seen recently, our estimated downward trends that we still see in transport emissions; emissions of NOx, emissions of particulate matter we estimate downward trends into the future. What we have since about 2000 is a levelling off of the air quality in response to those emissions improvements. We do not see the same sort of gradients in terms of the improvements in air quality. My feeling is that is probably a weakness in the emission factors that we use in our models and that is a weakness of the understanding of the technologies and how they perform in real service.
Q37 Dr Turner: To what extent are we attributing failure to technologies which are perhaps not intrinsic in the technologies themselves but down to the standards of maintenance and enforcement?
Dr McCrae: On
relatively old vehicles maintenance is very important. Since the introduction of the three-way
catalyst in the early 1990s modern motor vehicles are essentially computer
controlled in terms of their engine management systems and they are very much
more stable in terms of emissions signatures; they either work well in terms of
emissions or they work very poorly.
There is an increasing amount of legislation coming in to allow us to
identify when vehicles are poorly operating so either they are good or they are
bad. Previously, in older generations of
vehicles, there was much more of a distribution of emission signatures from
vehicles and now I believe they are either good or bad and, therefore, the
answer is to identify those vehicles that are failing. We do have in-service testing - the
Q38 Dr Turner: What ways do you see for the future of further reducing vehicle emissions?
Dr McCrae: I believe
that if you want to do this then technology has a role in introducing new
technologies and we see, for example, the introduction of
Q39 Dr Turner: It is achievable but every time you stand next to the exhaust of a bus you doubt it. If we tighten the emissions standards further and extend them to more pollutants, how expensive is this going to be?
Dr McCrae: I do not have figures for the actual cost in terms of the technologies that would be required to add to the basic cost of a model; I do not have those to hand, but we can try to find those out for you. There are some clear costs per lump of technology that one could introduce.
Q40 Dr Turner: What about the contribution of brake and tyre wear towards air quality, particularly PMs?
Dr McCrae: Brake and tyre wear is very important and it is one of the areas which has received very little work over many years. All the products of abrasion - so this is brake, tyre and road surface abrasion - are very significant in terms of the generation of PM10 concentrations to the roadside location. For me, the weakness in those is that we have some data on brake and tyre wear but it is relatively weak in relation to what we might consider more robust data for the conventional pollutants coming from motor vehicles where we have a fair amount of data. It is an area which has an immense paucity of information. One of the key areas where there is virtually no information is on the abrasion of the road surface which can be very important. Added to those three abrasion products of tyre, brake and wear, one of the key parameters that we need to think about is the re-suspension of particulate matter. This is particulate matter which is lying on the surface of the road which is entrained in the vehicle wake and causes a cloud behind vehicles, and that can contribute to roadside concentration of between a very small figure - a single percentage figure - up to almost 60 or 70 per cent of roadside concentration. That is a great uncertainty; it could be a very small component or it could be a major component of a roadside concentration.
Q41 Dr Turner: Is that what you would describe as secondary particulate matter? Do you think transport actually contributes to that?
Dr McCrae: Secondary particulate matter is normally something formed in the atmosphere, so it is some of the compounds like ammonium sulphate and those sorts of particulate compounds. It is a secondary source of particles in that it is not directly emitted from the exhaust pipe in terms of brake and tyre wear, so it could be classified as a secondary source of particles. It is not legislated anywhere in terms of seeking reductions in emissions of that sector. Whereas exhaust emissions are regulated, emissions from tyres, breaks and road surface are not regulated.
Q42 Dr Turner: I take it that your laboratory has a research programme on vehicle pollution, particularly particulates. Can you tell us a little about it?
Dr McCrae: We are a
project-based organisation so we compete in the market for research
projects. Over the last few years our
main ones have been looking at generating new emission factors for road
transport. That is a fairly major
programme, pulling in information from across
Q43 Dr Turner: Has that offered any options for reducing brake and tyre wear?
Dr McCrae: We are not actually at that stage. What we have been trying to do is to categorise the contribution of those sectors - brake, tyre and road surface wear - to total particulate emissions and, therefore, trying to use that data to inform the inventory developments which can then be used to put weight on targeting the policies for reducing particular sectors which are the most important.
Q44 Martin Horwood: In the context of climate change mitigation we are also talking about the shift towards electric vehicles and hydrogen powered vehicles and so on. Clearly these will still have brakes and tyres, so that kind of matter will still be an emission, but would you expect that to have a very dramatic impact on emissions from vehicles generally? Have you done any work on this?
Dr McCrae: At the point of use emission there will be significant improvements from moving towards electric vehicles. If you look at something like a hybrid vehicle we are looking at something like a 30 per cent reduction in emissions from tailpipe pollutants and, indeed, a 30 per cent improvement in fuel consumption. As you move towards fully electric vehicles obviously at point of use the emissions are moving down towards zero, other than those sources which are not coming from the tailpipe which are things like the abrasion products.
Q45 Martin Horwood: Although the shift is happening largely for other reasons it could have an extremely dramatic impact on air quality.
Dr McCrae: I think it could. There is obviously always a caveat on these issues and the big caveat is that the electricity or the power has to be generated somewhere and, therefore, we would want to combine with those sorts of policies if we want air quality improvements to move towards that sort of de-carbonisation of the power generation industry.
Q46 Mr Caton: Moving on to the role of local authorities in tackling air quality, how successful has local air quality management been?
Dr McCrae: The local air quality management process, I guess, was triggered by the Environment Act some years ago and what Defra did within that process was to cascade much of the responsibility for the measurement - in this case it was referred to as review and assessment of air quality - to local authorities. That has been fairly successful. If you want to look at local air quality you need to engage with local authorities who understand the local area and the local sources and, indeed, in much of the work done by local authorities you do not have to have complex models and so forth to identify hotspots because most local authority practitioners would actually know where the major areas of concern are across their networks. I think it has been quite a successful process. As you might expect I have a small caveat on that, and that is to do with the fact that local air quality management is about reviewing, assessing and measuring something which is no help in terms of improving air quality. What you need to do for that is to generate actions that will improve air quality and the review and assessment process has to develop an action plan, but what I see as one of the weaknesses in that is not the development of the action plan per se but the funding of the initiatives within an action plan are often relatively weak so the money available to actually implement those changes which seem sensible often do not see themselves in the network because of lack of resources, and that is both staff time in local authorities but also finances.
Q47 Mr Caton: So is that a failure to give proper priority to the issue that is stopping councils developing air quality management strategies or setting up low emission zones in your opinion?
Dr McCrae: My feeling is that local authorities and central Government spend a long time developing the strategies. As a researcher, one of the things I see as a weakness is the lack of assessment of those strategies in terms of their effectiveness and that is not some instant thing, it needs some research to go on to actually look at assessing what are the most efficient measures to improve air quality, but then also, once we have identified a few of those measures, to actually have them implemented in the network does require financing. I think that is one of the weaknesses in the whole process. At the end of a review and assessment process the weakness is a lack of resources to implement action plans.
Q48 Mr Caton: Do councils have access to adequate information to monitor and improve their policies in air quality?
Dr McCrae: I think my own feeling is that local authorities have too much information. There is an immense amount of literature and information on the mechanisms of review and assessment; it is a very process orientated system of measuring, assessing, modelling and reporting. Combined with that there are then all the various help desks which are available to local authorities to try and respond to particular questions that they may have on moving things forward with implementation. Then there are a whole range of technical reports from a range of bodies, including the reports from the air quality expert group that went some way to try to inform local authorities about some of the important issues in relation to particular pollutants.
Q49 Mr Caton: So as well as resourcing that we have already mentioned, how could air quality management best be improved at local level?
Dr McCrae: One of the complaints we often hear from local authorities is the lack of integrated work across government departments, so the difficulty engaging with the various government departments that have essentially stakeholders in that question, and they may be Defra, the Department for Transport, the Highways Agency, the Environment Agency. All these agencies need to be very joined-up providing very consistent advice to local authorities. I think it is often difficult for local authorities to seek that consensus from those bodies.
Q50 Joan Walley: You are talking very much from the technical aspects in terms of TRL and looking at the vehicle controls and pollution and so on. In terms of what you have just said about local authorities, I am interested in the planning aspect of this. You have said very clearly that you think t local authorities have got all this superb detailed expert knowledge; I do not see much evidence from where I sit of what they do with that because I do not see the transport officers influencing planning decisions which tend to put the most polluting operations in the most inappropriate places in residential areas. Do you have any comments at all on the planning process?
Dr McCrae: It was not my intention to imply that local authorities had all this knowledge; they have the knowledge available to them. One of the problems with local authorities is that the air quality staff within local authorities often have to have several different hats so that air quality may be something they are doing on a Monday and the rest of the week they are looking after other disciplines within the environmental health agenda, so air quality cannot be their only focus. That is a problem in terms of the dilution of their resources. In terms of the impact of planning legislation on air quality, it is a key topic and it is one that needs more work to evolve over the next couple of years to really have some teeth within that. There have been some successful applications within the planning system to aid air quality. To give an example, the London Borough of Greenwich in the use of their section 106 agreements to try to allocate money from developments to air quality issues has been very successful and it is being rolled out across the country in terms of how to do it and how to do it most effectively.
Q51 Joan Walley: Could you just elaborate on what kind of benefits might come from section 106 in terms of improving air quality?
Dr McCrae: Section 106 is an agreement between a developer and a local authority to try to ring-fence some money from the developer to support particular initiatives that will improve local air quality in that particular case. It may be as simple as re-designing a junction as part of the entry to a new housing development or the local road network; it may be other physical things like the support of air pollution modelling activities. So you could use that money for various aspects to support your air quality department within a local authority.
Q52 Joan Walley: Would you expect every local authority to have an air quality monitoring department?
Dr McCrae: I would not. I would expect them all to have an environmental health department and a highways and transportation department and those two departments need to talk to each other.
Q53 Joan Walley: You would expect them to talk to each other, would you?
Dr McCrae: Yes. We do see that quite successfully in many local authorities; there are some very active negotiations between those two departments that many years ago would not have spoken to each other.
Q54 Joan Walley: Could you perhaps give us an example of local authorities where that kind of joint working works well?
Dr McCrae: I think you see it in departments in
Q55 Chairman: Increasingly, things like emissions from engines are subject to regulation with some success in reducing various kinds of polluting emissions. Do you think it is possible to apply the same sort of regulatory approach to particulate matter that is generated by tyres and brakes and so on?
Dr McCrae: I am sure it is. In terms of particulate matter generated by brakes, there could be a way of enclosing the brake mechanism to limit the release of particles at that point of generation. In terms of tyres, it seems sensible to integrate within the whole idea of recycling of tyres to improve their longevity in service which would help with the recycling issue of tyres. Having said that, if you do make them harder or stiffer then you can affect the running resistance associated with tyres which is an important component of fuel consumption of a vehicle. One needs to be careful in terms of generating legislation on tyres for reduced particulate wear if it diminishes the rolling resistance and, therefore, the grip of the tyre and if you influence that in any way which could be associated with accidents.
Q56 Chairman: Thank you very much. We have some more witnesses so we will have to move on to, but thank you very much for your time this morning.
Dr McCrae: My pleasure.
Memorandum submitted by Environmental Research Group
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Professor Frank Kelly and Dr Gary Fuller, Environmental Research Group, King's College London, gave evidence.
Q57 Chairman: Good morning and welcome to the Committee. Thank you very much for coming in. Would you like just to introduce yourselves so we know exactly what you do. You have your titles there, but perhaps you could just summarise briefly the work that you are engaged in.
Professor Kelly: I am Frank Kelly, Professor of Environmental Health at King's College London. I lead a group called the Environmental Research Group which is probably unique, certainly in the UK if not in Europe, in the respect that it has expertise in the monitoring of air quality, expertise in the modelling of air quality into the future, expertise in the health effects of air quality and more recently, from January this year, we have established a science policy unit to try to bring forward the area we are discussing this morning.
Dr Fuller: I am Gary Fuller; I work in Frank's group. The area that I head is mainly responsible for the measurement of air pollution and also in trying to interpret what is happening, so going beyond actual measurement of numbers to interpret these in terms of sources and trends.
Q58 Chairman: Could you start by explaining how clear the link between poor air quality and mortality and morbidity actually is?
Professor Kelly: The link was established in the mid-1990s initially from American studies. Since that time the effects of air quality on health have been confirmed and strengthened across the world so in every continent where the issue has been examined then similar effects and similar magnitudes of effects have been seen. At this point in time the link is extremely strong.
Q59 Chairman: Is there a deprivation factor at work here as well?
Professor Kelly: In respect of social class?
Q60 Chairman: Yes.
Professor Kelly: If I was asked to point a finger at the most important source of pollutants we would look at major urban environments and within those environments it is traffic related emissions which appear to be the most dangerous. Unfortunately, in many instances the housing stock which is along those busy routes is often the most amenable to the individuals with less income.
Q61 Chairman: I was quite startled by the fact that if you take out the averaging in terms of shortening people's lives and look at people who are actually vulnerable, you are talking about as much as almost ten years off someone's life. That is pretty dramatic. If that could be substantially influenced by the choice of where they happen to live, that seems to me something which people ought to be made more aware of.
Professor Kelly: Yes. As you are aware, the
average figure for
Q62 Martin Horwood: Could I just ask a quick statistical question? The seven to eight months of life lost, is that averaged across the whole of the population including those who are not actually losing any life at all?
Professor Kelly: Yes, that is across the whole population in the
Q63 Martin Horwood: So amongst individuals affected it is going to be much more, is it not?
Professor Kelly: Yes. If you want me to try to put that in context I would say that if you took the population of London, because the air quality issue is more severe in London, then those statistics would likely change upwards.
Q64 Martin Horwood: I will come back to London, if I may. Is it sensible to use the often quoted numbers of premature deaths as a metric? It is obviously one which excites a lot of interest.
Professor Kelly: It is one that has certainly been hotly debated. It is not the current favoured metric which is used by the expert committee which informs the UK Government, COMEAP, but it is used by other countries. I think the issue about the number of premature deaths is that it is very easy to understand for the public so it is a good communication tool, but it is actually probably slightly less reliable from a statistical point of view than talking about months or years of life lost.
Q65 Martin Horwood: In terms of the impact on the public and politicians surely it is quite a sensible one for the UK Government to use if they are not using it at the moment.
Professor Kelly: From a communications viewpoint then it certainly would be. This is under debate at the moment as to how best to express the public health impact.
Q66 Martin Horwood: It has been suggested to us that the often quoted figure of 24,000 premature deaths a year is now pretty old and does not take into account some pollutants such as ozone and sulphur dioxide. Is that right?
Professor Kelly: That is not quite correct.
The 24,000 figure came from a 1998 report based on the short term health
effects of air pollution which was basically the ones that we understood best
at that point in time. It is now
acknowledged that if you calculate the long-term health impact of air pollution
- which is across a lifespan and involves the development of the chronic
diseases I mentioned earlier - then the numbers of individuals impacted will be
higher. The latest figures are being
worked on at the moment, but the basis for those figures has been published and
if one does a back of the envelope calculation on those new risk co-efficients
the sorts of numbers we are talking about now could be around 35,000. Calculations done in
Q67 Martin Horwood: That is 50,000 for the UK on average. You are not talking about a peak of 50,000; you are talking about an average in a year.
Professor Kelly: Yes, but you must admit that there is a certain degree of uncertainty associated with those figures because this is an extremely difficult calculation to do when you are looking across a lifespan of an individual.
Q68 Martin Horwood: You mentioned that London in particular was likely to suffer more than the rest of the country. The Campaign for Clean Air in London has quoted me a figure of 3,460 premature deaths for 2005 and suggested that there is some evidence that suggests that that number could be as high as 7,900. Do you know of any evidence that supports numbers that high?
Professor Kelly: The new risk co-efficients which were released last year by COMEAP
would support a figure of around 3,500 early deaths in
Q69 Martin Horwood: Do you think the Government's assessment of the health impacts of poor air quality is really adequate?
Professor Kelly: I think they could be criticised from the viewpoint that they have not come forward quick enough with data. It seems to be a relatively slow process compared to some other countries. I know the activity is ongoing at the moment and we will hear probably this year those official figures. However, the process has been slow and, more importantly, it really begs to address the issue of communication because if these figures are correct then air quality impact on public health really does come into play and can stand alongside other issues which the Government does give great time to, such as the impacts of obesity, alcoholism, passive cigarette smoking, et cetera; it really would put it up amongst those major risks.
Q70 Mark Lazarowicz: How far has the Government so far been able to quantify the costs of poor air quality in a financial sense?
Professor Kelly: A cost benefit analysis has been done and it was reported I believe in 2008 by Defra to be of the order of between £8 million and £20 billion in health costs per year and that range would reflect the low and the high risk co-efficients which I described earlier.
Q71 Mark Lazarowicz: Do you think that is a fair assessment from your knowledge?
Professor Kelly: Based on the information that we have now, yes, that would be a fair assessment.
Q72 Mark Lazarowicz: Are these costs adequately included in impact assessments and policy appraisals, for example, by local and central Government? Are they given full weight in such analysis?
Professor Kelly: My belief at the moment is that those new figures probably have not been used in that respect but will be in due course when we also have the loss in life year figures coming out.
Q73 Mark Lazarowicz: What should be done to ensure that happens?
Professor Kelly: I would hope there would be a strong message coming from committees like this to Government that this is an issue which needs to be taken more seriously than perhaps it has been in the past. I would like to see that the Government provides adequate resources to the offices within Defra and the Health Protection Agency which examine air quality and its effects to resource them correctly to be able to move forward these agendas much more rapidly. I think it will be very important to have a public awareness campaign because it is the public who will ultimately play a major role in helping us to improve air quality.
Q74 Mark Lazarowicz: How substantially do you think we could reduce those costs with the right policy?
Professor Kelly: If we manage to bring air quality to at least the EU objective levels and hopefully even beyond that to the WHO guidelines (which are even stricter for some of the pollutants) then the health benefits will be considerable and, therefore, there should be a considerable saving associated with it. However, in the short-term the cost to mitigate air pollution will be substantial so I suspect it is going to be a major investment in the short-term for a very large gain across the long-term.
Dr Fuller: There was an assessment done as part of the Clean Air for
Q75 Mark Lazarowicz: What kind of investment is required to achieve that in terms of actually tackling the problem? How much would need to be spent for how much benefit?
Professor Kelly: We are moving slightly out of my area of expertise, but Defra has reported in the same report where they estimated the health costs that mitigation would be of the order of £6 billion to £8 billion, so less than the perceived health benefits, but I am not sure what they were costing within that.
Q76 Mr Caton: Aside from health, where you have given us figures, are the other environmental impacts of air quality being quantified? I am thinking of things like biodiversity, climate change itself, crop yields and that sort of thing.
Professor Kelly: I know that the biodiversity/ecological benefits of improving air quality have not been costed, so the figures I gave were only for public health benefits. That is something that remains to be done and I would imagine those benefits would be sizeable. In respect of climate change, as indicated by the first witness today, this is a difficult issue because often decisions made to mitigate climate change may have detrimental effects on air quality. A very simple example here is dieselisation where it was observed that there was benefit of moving a lot of the fleet and some of the private car traffic to diesel because they are more efficient and produce less CO2 but we get an air qualify disbenefit associated with that. Those calculations could be numerous and it really depends what policy options are taken.
Q77 Mr Caton: Are you aware of any work being done on these aspects?
Professor Kelly: Yes. Defra have published a report which has looked at both issues and there is a lot of useful work in there. The Health Protection Agency have also looked at the health impacts of climate change and within that they acknowledge that there need to be decisions taken which benefit both air quality and climate change.
Q78 Dr Turner: Can I ask perhaps a naïve question? We have discussed the public health impact in terms of shortened lives, but how do you actually measure this? It implies that you have, as a standard of comparison, a population which is not exposed to pollution and by definition I cannot think of one.
Professor Kelly: It is not a naïve question at all and it is a very difficult area, but I will try and briefly explain what has happened. It was not easy but it was easier back in the late 1990s when the short-term health effects of air quality were quantified. What I mean there is that if there is an air pollution episode then you quantify the number of extra people who have died during that episode or shortly thereafter, or the number of people who have arrived in hospital, and those figures are easily obtainable. There are studies across the world that show that whenever you have an air pollution episode you do see increases in both those metrics. The much more important but more difficult measure to make is where you are comparing people who live in different communities that are exposed to different air quality and different concentrations of air pollutants across their lifespan, and that is the long-term health disbenefits. Those types of studies are done, as I said, in every continent across the world and instead of finding somewhere where there is no air pollution, because clearly that does not exist, what they are comparing is an area which has got very low air pollution to an area which has a high air pollution and then you quantify the effects based on the difference between the air quality. When that is done, and it is standardised to a ten microgram per metre cubed difference in particle concentration then you can produce a figure which gives you the risk co-efficient which can be applied.
Q79 Dr Turner: In Europe we have produced a number of air quality standards to promote air quality: EU Limit Values, EU Target Values, national objectives under the Environment Act and Pollution Days. How effective a contribution do these standards make to improving public health?
Professor Kelly: I think if they are adhered to they can be very effective. I will give you an example of a recent study
which has come out of the
Q80 Dr Turner: That is very interesting. Which of the air quality standards and policy instruments that are available do you think has been most important in delivering improved air quality and reducing exposure?
Professor Kelly: From a health viewpoint the air quality standard which has most importance as far as we understand it at this point in time is the particulate standard because the particulate standard gives the biggest health risk co-efficient, ie it has the biggest impact on our health. All air pollutants impact on our health but the particulate one is particularly important to get right and, of course, that is one which, hearing about again this morning, is a particularly difficult one and there is a lot we still do not understand about particulates and their sources and the direct health effects. In any study that has been done there has always been a very positive and strong link between particulate exposure and health outcome.
Q81 Dr Turner: We have a fairly complicated regime of regulations governing air quality. Does this complication lead to resources being spread too thinly and not targeted on the things which most matter?
Professor Kelly: I think I have already stated that I do not think there is enough
resource given to the issue in the
Q82 Dr Turner: Is there anything that can be done to raise the public awareness of the effects of poor air quality?
Professor Kelly: I think there is a lot that can be done. I do not think the public appreciate the seriousness of the risk of poor air quality in urban areas. I think that if questioned they would acknowledge that there is an issue and maybe they have heard that it will reduce their life expectancy by seven or eight months, but I do not think they would understand that there is a big impact on pregnancy outcomes in respect of pre-term births; low gestational aged children; I do not think they are aware that there is strong evidence coming out of California which suggests that children who live in highly polluted areas lose the ability for their lungs to develop to their full potential and if this is the case and it is not resolved by the time they reach 20 then they will never gain that lost lung function again, that will always be with them for the rest of their lives; I do not think the public would appreciate that particulates appear to play a major role in the development of heart disease or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (by 2020 there will be more people suffering from that than there will be of heart disease). I do not think the public has that general awareness that air quality, some of which they are influencing by the choice of vehicle they buy, by the fuel that vehicle has, by lifestyle issues about whether they are using their car for short trips when they could walk or cycle, or where they perhaps sit with their car idling for five minutes at a junction when they do not need to. If they had that information about these issues they probably would help to change the major problem we have before us.
Q83 Dr Turner: That is very interesting. So if the public were aware of these very serious consequences, many of which are down to their own actions and amenable to amelioration by their own actions, this would make a significant difference. Do you think it would also be useful to have increased public pressure on regulatory authorities to help improve air quality?
Professor Kelly: I do. If the official figures, when they are released, are of the order which I have suggested this morning, and which the European reports have suggested, then clearly this issue is much larger than fatalities associated with road accidents or even serious injury from road accidents in the UK, yet there is considerably more resource and drive given to try to improve that public health issue than there is this one.
Q84 Chairman: So you really think if there were a greater public awareness it would lead to significant behaviour change.
Professor Kelly: I suspect it would do, yes.
Dr Fuller: With all of these things it is very difficult territory to entirely put the problem on members of the public because in many cases they are the people who are the innocent victims, be it the person who lives close to the road and so forth. There is a need also for government to enable people to make the right choices. It is no use saying that people should be using public transport if the public transport is not available. I think that is quite obvious really.
Q85 Joan Walley: Can I return to the question I raised previously about planning controls? Certainly in my constituency people are very much aware that certain developments could bring about greater risk of reduced air quality and they are just totally frustrated because there does not seem to be the ability between the transport engineers who are consulted about planning decisions and the environmental health officers who may or may not be there consulting too, to actually look at the kind of conditions in terms of planning applications which appear not to be linked to the overall guidance and appear not to be linked to the regional spatial strategies as well. I feel very strongly that there should be some way in which planning guidance at local and regional level could result in development, be it residential development or operations which particularly bring worse air quality to an area, and should be the focus of controls at a local level. I do not see where the ability is for that to happen. I would like your comments on that.
Dr Fuller: I think you illustrate a very good point. As Ian McCrae alluded to earlier about joined-up thinking, we have a lot of examples of this across Government. In local government, for example, it is the responsibility of the environmental health departments to actually assess the problem, but they are not generally the people who are responsible for the solutions, be it their transport department or their planners as well. You can say perhaps the same within central Government, that the responsibility lies within Defra, the responsibility for roads lies with the Department for Transport.
Q86 Joan Walley: It is between so many different departments, so how do you get that coordination?
Dr Fuller: Indeed, and I think that is challenging. I suppose it is a matter of making those people that are responsible for the decisions to actually have the obligation to achieve the limit value or the target or the ambient concentration. At the same time there are some examples of excellence in the planning areas as well, the low emission strategies for instance, which are really interesting ideas being put forward on a planning front. I would probably agree with you that it does need to be joined-up a lot better.
Q87 Joan Walley: At the moment the Government is consulting about the planning guidance which should go into the regional spatial strategies now that the responsibility for planning has gone into the Regional Development Agencies and there is a requirement to look at ways in which that planning guidance will have sustainable development objectives relating to it. Do you know of any research, either your own or anyone else's, that is being done that could assist the application of that new planning guidance to somehow or another pass an evaluation of the different costs of air quality improvements so that you could get a formula to be able to assist local planning decisions to locate the more polluting operations further away from where people live?
Professor Kelly: There is guidance that no new development should seriously impact on air quality to make it breach the air quality standards. That is a starting point.
Q88 Joan Walley: You have existing planning use which cannot necessarily be changed.
Professor Kelly: Sure, but I am saying that is a starting point and then thereafter
you should do a health impact assessment on that additional burden to that
community and if that health impact assessment shows that there are going to be
considerably negative health effects - be it on the children or the resources
or health facilities available locally - then all those issues should be
brought in together. That is why all
these departments that
Q89 Joan Walley: That does not happen though, does it?
Professor Kelly: It does not probably happen enough but, again, this is moving outside my own area of expertise. Certainly in some very large developments all these things are requirements but maybe they are not always requirements on smaller developments.
Q90 Martin Horwood: If those health impact assessments at local level are being done using existing government methodology, your answers to the earlier questions suggested they could be under-estimating premature deaths by as much as a hundred per cent a year.
Professor Kelly: Correct.
Q91 Martin Horwood: One hesitates to use the words "cover-up", and I am sure you would not do either.
Professor Kelly: I would never use that word at all. There has been a slow pace in the production of the new figures simply because I do not think that resources are put into the departments which are working on these issues. It is not acknowledged to be a major public health problem. I think the new figures, when they come out, will change that perspective.
Q92 Chairman: Does that raise the question of how good the relationship between people like you and the Government is in terms of providing information which might then affect policy?
Professor Kelly: The system which is operating in this country is that people like myself are asked to sit on expert committees. We provide advice through those expert committees to Defra and to the Department of Health, et cetera. Clearly reports arise from those committees and thereafter people like myself really do not have any influence as to what happens and if that information is taken onboard and used in policy setting.
Q93 Chairman: Does the actual monitoring take place in a way that maximises the utility value to the policy makers in local and central Government?
Professor Kelly: It has not been until relatively recently and that is not because
of any poor decision-making on behalf of those responsible, it is really the
more recent appreciation that we need more information about particular types
of particles, for example the smaller PM2.5 particles, or the components of
those particles. There is now a very
good monitoring network in the
Dr Fuller: As Ian alluded to earlier, there is excellent monitoring in the
Chairman: Thank you very much. That has been a useful session from out point of view. I am grateful to you for coming in.
Memorandum submitted by Defra
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Graham Pendlebury, Director, Environment and International Directorate, Mr Iain Forbes, Head of Air Quality Branch, and Mr Chris Parkin, Head of Engineering Standards Branch, Department for Transport, gave evidence.
Q94 Chairman: Good morning and welcome; we are grateful to you for coming in to talk to us. Could you tell us what the Department for Transport is actually doing to reduce air pollution from road vehicles?
Mr Pendlebury: We have a number of policy instruments. The biggest single area where we focus our attention and where we get the biggest wins is through vehicle technology standards. Of course these emerge from the European processes, the so-called Euro standards, which I am sure you have heard of, although the Department plays a very major role in negotiating those standards and leading the discussions around what might be the appropriate standards. We have done a lot of that over the past 15 or 20 years or so. It is through the introduction of Euro standards that we get the biggest single reduction in vehicle emissions, but obviously there is a whole range of other policies as well, whether they be small scale fiscal tweaking, such as the Reduce Pollution Certificates to encourage the earlier uptake of forthcoming Euro standards. Then, of course, there is the whole basket of environmental policies that we have that also support vehicle emission reductions. For example, our rather ambitious goals for effectively de-carbonising road transport through the use of electric plug-in hybrid vehicles and so forth will have significant air quality benefits as well; congestion reduction policies, the work that we do with sustainable travel initiatives and so forth. The whole package helps, we hope, bring down air quality problems and eventually over time eliminate them.
Q95 Chairman: Can the Department point to having urged within the EU the faster introduction of more demanding vehicle emissions standards?
Mr Pendlebury: I might ask Mr Parkin who has more direct experience of this to comment in a minute. Since 1992 we are moving towards Euro5 and Euro6 standards, so in the course of about 15 to 18 years we have gone through about five different standards, so the rate of churn, if you like, and change in development of Euro standards is pretty fast as it is. We have to bear in mind what are the technological feasibilities of what we can actually do with particular emission control technologies, so insofar as whether things can be done faster - it is always ideal if things are done faster - I think there has been quite a fair pace already. Chris, is there any particular instance where we have been pushing for faster introduction?
Mr Parkin: I think the most obvious recent example is on the passenger car and light goods vehicle Euro5 and Euro6 standards where the Commission's original proposal was actually just for a single stage Euro5 standard without any significant reductions in diesel NOx limits. The Department pushed very hard for the addition of a more demanding Euro6 standard that reduced diesel NOx limits by around 70 per cent. That was something where we pushed very strongly for an additional significant measure beyond what the Commission requested. There is also the addition of extra measures to control particle emissions in the Euro5 standard. When that was first proposed the Commission proposed a relatively simple 80 per cent reduction in particulate mass limits. Our Department has been very active in UNECE for developing new techniques to better control particle emissions and better measure particle emissions, particularly to ensure we control emissions of the ultra-fine particles which are believed to have the greatest health impacts. We pushed the Commission there to include these new measurement techniques and set very stringent limits using those techniques as part of the Euro5 standard and that has resulted in a limit which will effectively reduce diesel particle emissions by 99 per cent compared to current vehicles.
Q96 Chairman: How much of a priority within the Department is air quality?
Mr Pendlebury: As I am sure you are aware we have five overarching departmental strategic objectives, one of which relates to safety, security and health of the British people and that is where we locate, if you like, our air quality efforts as essentially a public health issue. Therefore, because it aligns very will with one of these five strategic objectives, it is something that we give quite a lot of priority to. Obviously we are always trying to balance or hit as many goals as we can so one can never say that any particular policy area is given priority over others. I was just reflecting on this earlier this morning, that one of the areas that is often talked about where we are having to balance different priorities is around reduction in climate change impacts of transport and air quality impacts. One of the things we do know and agonise over is that some of the technologies that are used to deliver Euro standards have some penalty in CO2. We have gone for the air quality impacts yet often people say we prioritise climate change perhaps rather more than we do air quality. It is a bit difficult to answer your question directly but it is certainly something that we attach a lot of attention to and obviously we have ministers who are very engaged in it and ministers who work jointly with Defra ministers in particular on this subject.
Q97 Chairman: Some of the evidence we have heard suggests that if we are trying to reduce deaths then more attention paid to air quality might have a bigger impact than trying to refine still further some road safety measures. What do you think about that?
Mr Pendlebury: That is an interesting one. The problem with the 3,000 deaths and 30,000 serious injuries on the road is that those are very immediate, visible, directly attributable impacts and we can devise policy solutions that meet them, whereas with the air quality area it tends to be contributing to a worsenment of someone's existing condition. It is a rather apples and pears comparison really. I think it is certainly the case that more attention as the evidence builds up has been given to air quality impacts and one of the things that you will be aware of was the recent Prime Minister's strategy unit report on urban transport which identified air quality problems as perhaps being a bigger part of the story than had hitherto been suggested, so obviously that is an area we would always want to continue to look at. I think it would be difficult to say, "Okay, let's prioritise this a bit more than road safety and take our eye of the road safety ball", because of the very visible and immediate impacts that road safety measures tend to have.
Q98 Chairman: If we were to ask you how you would demonstrate that air quality is a priority within the Department, what would be the two or three things you could point to to show that?
Mr Pendlebury: I would point to the fact that over the past 15 to 20 years
emissions from road vehicle transport have come down dramatically despite a
very significant increase in traffic volumes.
That has not come about by accident, that has come about by measures led
in the large part by the
Q99 Joan Walley: Given that light touch regulation is very fashionable, I am just wondering where your priorities fit in terms of regulation and in respect of particularly public transport and buses, what resources go into control and regulation of emissions from buses? How many prosecutions have there been, or what kind of budget you have or what you would feel your success is in terms of making sure that buses are not over-polluting?
Mr Pendlebury: If we are doing prosecutions, then we have clearly failed as a policy; I would hate to think we judge it in terms of the number of prosecutions. I have a small confession to make: as well as being the Environment and International Director, I am also the Better Regulation Director for the Department so in line with prevailing government policy I am keen that we do not just lay on more and more regulations, we have to try to find a balance and regulatory instrument is not necessarily always the best option to follow. Obviously the Euro standards apply in the bus sector as much as they do in other sectors. You have a problem with buses which is that the turnover of the fleet is relatively low compared to, say, traffic. We know that the average age of buses is over eight years and within that average there will be some that are quite a lot older than that. Equally, it is very important. Something like two-thirds of all public transport journeys are undertaken by bus and the more we can layer regulations onto the bus sector the more we are potentially affecting the availability and affordability of bus services. In terms of your specific question about how many prosecutions have there been for failing to meet minimum standards, I would not know the answer to that question honestly. I do not know if my colleagues do.
Mr Forbes: Every year all vehicles undergo an emissions test as part of their vehicle test and we do know that less than one per cent of vehicles fail that emissions test which has led to us assuming that the vehicle standards have been well engineered.
Q100 Joan Walley: A further question from that is given the discussions that are taking place about future public transport, what input have you had into the policy of a general trend of policy so that, for example, you could put in controls or basic standards of the age of bus vehicles when looking at bus contracts?
Mr Pendlebury: That would be something we could do.
Q101 Joan Walley: Do you?
Mr Pendlebury: We do not determine them; these are largely locally derived quality bus partnerships and so forth.
Q102 Joan Walley: So neither the Department for Transport nor the local authorities have actually got any control over the most up-to-date standards? An area could not say, for example, that they wanted to have only the highest standards in terms of air quality control.
Mr Forbes: To give one example of a local authority that has done that,
Q103 Joan Walley: Would that actually facilitate those higher standards?
Mr Forbes: Yes, it would mean that a certain proportion of the bus operator's fleet would have to meet the higher and cleaner Euro standards.
Q104 Joan Walley: Do you monitor how many local authorities have actually introduced that?
Mr Forbes: We engage with local authorities to see what is working, what the good practice is and seek to share that where possibility.
Q105 Joan Walley: Which local authorities would you say have the best example in terms of what is working?
Mr Forbes: In terms of negotiation with bus operators, I think you can point
to
Q106 Chairman: Given that the importance of trying to improve the fleet and with more demanding Euro standards obviously new vehicles in all categories are getting cleaner but, as you have identified, the real problem is the existing stock and the fact that there are a large number of vehicles on the road which pre-date some of these standards, is there any incentive for local authorities to do as Norwich and Oxford? Is there any reward they get for doing this or do the councils just feel rather better about themselves?
Mr Pendlebury: Where the local authorities know there an air quality problem and
they have declared an air quality management area and we are saying in their local
transport plans that they should be integrating transport policies within their
area to deliver both their public transport objectives and also their air
quality objectives, they have that incentive themselves. I am not sure that a top-down command and
control edict from
Q107 Chairman: It was not really a top-down command and control I was thinking of, I was just wondering if there might be some incentive. Another factor which is quite mature is modal shift of course. If we can get more people to go by buses there can also be quite a bit benefit. Are there steps that the Department is able to take to try to encourage that modal shift?
Mr Pendlebury: Modal shift across the piece - whether it is from cars into buses or freight from road to rail and so forth - is something that we are keen to do and we have a number of different measures to try and bring that around whether it is freight facilities grants or very large amounts of public money that go into funding bus services through bus service operator grants and measures such as that, so we are keen wherever feasible to try to encourage a modal shift. Although we never tend to get into the business of trying to tell people how they should travel around, we want to make services as attractive as possible even if it is something as fundamental as the concessionary fares policy that we have had with respect to senior citizens. There are a lot of measures around there. You are talking really about much broader DfT policy initiatives than ones that are specifically aimed at air quality because air quality will be one part of that but it will be to with congestion reduction and climate change benefits and so forth as well.
Q108 Martin Horwood: Given the health impact of this alone and given the first evidence we heard today that said that shifting towards low carbon vehicles like electric vehicles would make a dramatic impact on all this, is DfT, or the UK generally, trying to pressure for a much faster timetable for the introduction of zero carbon vehicles at EU level?
Mr Pendlebury: There are two answers to that. The first is in terms of the regulatory measures which is where you have things like the new car CO2 standards which again we have been heavily involved in negotiating, so they are standards which apply in 2015 and again in 2020 which introduce pretty radical cuts in the standards that will apply to new vehicles. Quite apart from that, we established a few months ago now something called the Office for Low Emission Vehicles within the departments. We did not locate it within DfT but it actually comprises officials from three government departments whose remit is to accelerate the pace of change and it has a budget in total - all the money that it is managing and disposing of - of about £400 million which, in current circumstances, is a very substantial amount.
Q109 Martin Horwood: In practice the European car market is going to respond to European regulations over the whole car market.
Mr Pendlebury: Yes.
Q110 Martin Horwood: Should we not be bringing forward the target for all new cars to be zero carbon to something like 2040 or even earlier?
Mr Pendlebury: There is a 2020 target which is 95 grams of CO2 per kilometre which is substantially below the Prius model which has just been phased out so that is pretty radical technology. You can just about deliver that with conventional technologies without switching into hybrid or plug-in electric, but our whole incentive mechanisms that we will be introducing to get ultra low carbon vehicles in and which will take effect very shortly (I am not able to give you a precise date at the moment) and we will be trying to bring these things forward as fast as we reasonably can, but obviously in a sense we can go as fast as the manufacturers are able to deliver the models.
Q111 Martin Horwood: My question was not really about these local incentives, it was about whether we are pressing the rest of Europe to move much faster towards what you are calling ultra low carbon vehicles.
Mr Pendlebury: We are pressing for 95 grams by 2020.
Q112 Martin Horwood: I am sorry to cut across this, but I am talking about a complete shift towards zero carbon or very, very low carbon vehicles which needs to be on a timescale that allows the car market and R&D to respond and so on were you to invest in charging points around the country or something like that. Are we trying to achieve that kind of shift on a faster timescale than is presently envisaged?
Mr Pendlebury: We would like to see that shift moving as fast as it is reasonably feasible to do, bearing in mind that you have to de-carbonise the road transport sector and you have to think about the energy generation sector. If you move to all electric plug-in hybrid, you need to think very much about what is the future shape of our electricity generation and so forth. I would be pretty confident, certainly on the timescales you are providing, that we will be getting towards that complete de-carbonisation but obviously we can only go as fast as the technology will take us as far as the availability of rare earth metal or whatever it is; we have to work within the bounds of technology.
Q113 Martin Horwood: The technology responds to the signals that government and particularly the European Union gives it, does it not?
Mr Pendlebury: It will do to some extent, yes.
Q114 Mr Caton: Moving on to the costings issue, how are the costs of poor air quality included in your Department's policy appraisals?
Mr Pendlebury: That is quite a complicated question. There are three sorts of areas where we do this. There are policy measures or programmes of policies which are targeted specifically at air quality improvements where we have a particular set of methodologies that we would use. There is then, if you like, a general policy appraisal where we are looking at policies that are not primarily aimed at air quality but may have air quality impacts - for better or for worse - and then there are the individual scheme appraisals for particular infrastructure projects. So we have slightly different approaches on each of those circumstances based on the evidence that is available. I was looking earlier today, and one of the things that we publish as a major policy initiative for the Department was a low carbon transport strategy published last July. As we have already referred to, that can have some sort of impact on air quality, for good and for bad, and so we did a very detailed impact assessment, a vast tome, which actually sets out the methodology we have applied, what cost values, how have we monetised air quality impacts; we have done separate health impact assessments as well as sustainability assessments just sot they get some sort of handle on whether our direction of travel on low carbon transport is one that carries with it air quality benefits on an acceptable level of cost that we can try and mitigate against.
Q115 Martin Horwood: We heard today and in written submissions how the health costs of poor air quality are arrived at, but the environmental costs in the sense of eco-systems, biodiversity, climate change and the impact on crops does not seem to be costed. Are you doing any work on that?
Mr Pendlebury: It is true to say that if you look at eco-systems impacts there is not, as far as I am aware, a properly agreed methodology for quantifying and monetising those benefits, so what we will tend to do, therefore, is describe, if you like, in narrative terms what we think the likely impacts will be, try to quantity those and, if possible, monetise them where we can but it is not as easy as it is for some other issues. It is certainly the case that we do take these things into account but the methodology that is used is perhaps slightly different from ones that we would use for human health impacts and so forth.
Mr Forbes: As more evidence comes to light, we are able to know more details about the impacts and that will all feed into the work we do. We are always keen to make sure that we are working with colleagues in Defra and the Health Protection Agency to know the current state of the art in terms of monetising the impacts of air quality.
Q116 Mr Caton: How are the costs of actions to address air quality calculated and then balanced against the cost associated with poor air quality?
Mr Pendlebury: There is a set of methodologies that are developed by an
inter-departmental group on costs and benefits which has an air quality
sub-group. These are essentially
economists and analysts around
Q117 Mr Caton: Are the penalties of failing to meet European Limit Values factored into those cost-benefit analyses?
Mr Forbes: Any potential fines are not factored into the impacts of air quality.
Q118 Mr Caton: Is there a reason for that?
Mr Forbes: I would have to rely on the experts in the inter-departmental group to let me know the exact reasons, but I would imagine it is because those costs are not as easy to calculate as the other costs that are factored in.
Mr Pendlebury: I would think it would be difficult to include in a cost-benefit analysis a cost of breaking the law.
Q119 Martin Horwood: Given these legions of analysts who are producing methodologies for you across Whitehall, are you not a little ashamed of the evidence from Professor Kelly which suggested that you are so out of line with best practice in terms of, for instance, bringing into the health assessment long-term health conditions and so on, that you could be underestimating the number of premature deaths by as much as 100 per cent?
Mr Pendlebury: I did not hear Professor Kelly's evidence; I only caught the tail end of it. I think "ashamed" is quite a strong word. We publish a lot of research; we take our evidence from COMEAP, the independent bodies of health experts who are appointed by the Department of Health, the Health Protection Agency and so forth and indeed I must emphasise that that is where DfT will take its evidence from, so there is a wealth of evidence published out there. There is expert advice, there may be different views from different experts from different parts of the academia, but I think we would generally say that we take it pretty seriously.
Q120 Martin Horwood: He strongly suggested that you were lagging behind best practice in other countries, if I am not misquoting him, that potentially 24,000 or so premature deaths currently assumed could be as high - on a worse case scenario admittedly and with some variabilities and doubts in there - as 50,000.
Mr Forbes: As Mr Pendlebury said, we do take our evidence from the independent groups of experts who recommend on these issues and if the Health Protection Agency and COMEAP were telling us something different, we would use different figures.
Mr Parkin: It might be relevant to add that on policies such as the Euro standards the health impact assessments that we currently have and the monetisation values have actually supported the most stringent, technically demanding standards for particle control so I do not think there has been a practical problem there in terms of the impact on policy.
Q121 Martin Horwood: His point in evidence was that you do need to communicate the really dramatic impact of air quality much better and clearly these kinds of numbers would help if we were using best practice and taking long-term health effects as well as others are doing.
Mr Pendlebury: So the suggestion is about communication to the public of health impacts.
Martin Horwood: It is both; it is just that it is rather convenient for government - and he rightly hesitated to use the phrase "cover-up", as I would too - that we seem to be going so slowly on adopting best practice in terms of taking in the full health impacts that we have ended up with numbers that significantly underestimate the number of premature deaths and other health impacts which does not help to highlight the problem.
Q122 Dr Turner: What assessment has the Department for Transport made of the most cost effective ways to reduce pollution from vehicles? To put this into context, recent research shows that vehicle brakes and tyres produce as much particulate matter as actual tailpipe emissions. They are unregulated and tailpipe emissions are regulated.
Mr Pendlebury: I am going to ask Mr Parkin to talk about this in a minute. This is an interesting question because you are quite right in the sense that that exhaust emissions have decreased dramatically over the past 20 years or so, largely as a result of the Euro standards and so forth, but actually emissions from tyre and brake wear have increased by 24 per cent since 1990. That is actually broadly consistent with the increase in traffic because the frictional forces when one is using brakes and so forth are not affected by standards. You are right in that sense, that it is unregulated. I know that in discussing this in the Department it is one of those areas where designing some sort of mechanism to reduce this kind of brake and wear and tear is a classic area where we cannot compromise the safety aspects of tyres and brakes, that is a fundamental issue; it is more difficult to identify what are the solutions. Chris was telling me the other day that perhaps a little bit more evidence is starting to emerge that one of the issues around particulates from tyre and brake wear is to do - this perhaps relates to what some of the previous witnesses were saying - is to do with the chemical composition, what is actually the nature of the particulates rather than just the size and quantum of them. If there is an issue around chemical composition, then we are perhaps in a better position to do something about that; that is within the bounds of possibility that we can devise ways of solving that. Devising ways of reducing the friction from brakes is a little more difficult but I am straying slightly into areas of technology that I do not know about. Chris, do you want to say anything more about tyres and brakes?
Mr Parkin: Yes. I think I would just note that particulate from mechanical wear processes like tyre and brake wear, and clutch wear as well, tend to be a much larger size of particle and expert opinion has tended to be that such particles are not as effective at penetrating into the human respiratory system and for that reason do not tend to have such significant health impacts. As I understand it from discussing with colleagues in Defra, the quantification of the health impacts that we currently have for exposure to particles are based on the fine fraction of particles and not based on the coarse fraction that would be contributed by brake and tyre wear. As Mr Pendlebury mentioned, it is rather difficult to control brake and tyre wear because wear is a fundamental factor of frictional processes, but if this emerging evidence that Mr Pendlebury mentioned does highlight particular chemical species within particulates as being of concern, then potentially there would be scope to perhaps regulate there, so we will need to keep an eye on this evidence as it emerges and review that with a view to forming future policy.
Q123 Dr Turner: There must be some scope there. I seem to remember that once upon a time asbestos figured very largely in brake pads and now I take it it is principally carbon fibre based, so there has been a shift in the chemical nature of the particulate emissions already. Do you have a handle on that?
Mr Parkin: I do not have any detail on that but that is absolutely correct, that asbestos is no longer used in brake lining because its use is controlled by regulation.
Mr Pendlebury: Thinking about braking and tyre wear, we have seen that the quantum of emissions from those processes has increased and it has actually increased slightly faster than the rate of traffic growth. That is in part, I think, to do with congestion, stop-start traffic conditions and so forth. If we actually get some local congestion reduction measures to smooth traffic flow, that should have a beneficial impact, a side benefit if you will.
Q124 Dr Turner: How do you set about identifying problem categories of vehicles and pollution hot-spots that need to be identified and targeted?
Mr Pendlebury: It is interesting that you use that phrase "pollution hot-spots"
because this is one the problems and dilemmas that we face now, which is that
when the latest generation of Euro standards is in place - whether it is for
cars or heavy duty vehicles - we would probably have gone about as far as you
can go with technology so we are then into how do you deal with these very
highly localised hot-spots which may just be individual junctions, individual
stretches of road and so forth. Then
ultimately solutions rest with local authorities to devise solutions, but part
of that will most definitely be identifying what is the nature of the traffic
that is causing the problem. In a sense,
when you look
Q125 Dr Turner: Could you comment on the effect of the vehicle scrappage system on air pollution. It was introduced because of economic problems but I do not seem to remember it having any environmental factors in it. Did you give any thought to using it as an opportunity to improve air quality?
Mr Pendlebury: The scrappage scheme itself is coming to the end of its life, I believe. It is operated by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills and you are absolutely right, the scrappage scheme was about supporting the automotive sector rather than delivering any specific environmental objectives. It is a good example of a policy that has environmental spin-offs and that simply comes from the fact that the older vehicles that you trade in will be ones that will be meeting only the very earliest or maybe no Euro standards at all, whereas the new vehicles you buy will be meeting the highest Euro standards and will also be having much greater fuel efficiency and so forth as well, we hope. There is absolutely a benefit in air quality terms in getting the older cars off the road and newer cars on the road and I am sure that that is something that could be quantified. One of the things about the scrappage scheme is that it was designed to be as simple as possible and trying to build in criteria that went beyond the age of the vehicle was going to make it exponentially more complicated so in the end the decision by the Business Department was to go for simplicity and I accept that, but there would certainly have been spin-off benefits in air quality terms from having more new vehicles in the fleet than there would otherwise have been.
Q126 Dr Turner: Could we turn to PS28, for which you are jointly responsible. I was slightly puzzled by your evidence that the Department for Transport had been agitating for the most rigorous air quality standards possible in new Euro standards, yet the UK government is applying for a time extension on PM10 aspects and NO2 on the new directive. Does there not seem to be something inconsistent there?
Mr Pendlebury: It is the collective position of the Government that we think that
a time extension is needed or helpful to enable us to get the measures in place
to deliver compliance with the directive and of course one of the things one
should always bear in mind is that this is a pan-European problem. I think
Q127 Dr
Turner: Defra may be the lead department on
this agenda, but your Department is in the best position to deliver the actual
results. What incentive is there for the
Department for Transport to set, for instance, domestic policy targets on air
quality as part of its shared responsibility for delivering
Mr Pendlebury: It is a slightly circular argument.
We are co-owners of
Q128 Dr
Turner: How great a priority do you give to
it?
Mr Pendlebury: We talked about this a few minutes ago. I would like to think we put as much effort into delivering air quality benefits as we do to road safety. Historically we have had a large road safety effort and of course the road safety benefits that have flowed from that have been very, very considerable. The reduction in emissions from road vehicles is comparable, if not better, than the reduction in road casualties from our road safety efforts and, as I mentioned before, one of the things that we agonised over is how you optimise air quality benefits versus other benefits. We take very seriously climate change issues in the Department and the fact that we have a set of measures to have a climate change penalty has illustrated that in that case we prioritise that area. We do put a lot of effort into this. On a philosophical level one looks at the Department for Transport to resolve these issues; it is everybody in this room who has a responsibility for this. It is the cars that we drive, it is the goods that we expect to be available in our supermarkets, it is the public transport that we take and so forth. Those are the ultimate causes of this problem and there are measures that the Department can take to encourage people to bring about technology shifts and so forth but there are wider societal issues as well, including the priority which society places on this issue.
Q129 Dr Turner: You are absolutely right, but you cannot be held responsible for the whole problem and society as a whole can. What efforts do you make to try to make the public more aware of the problems and the contribution that the public, by their own behaviour and use of vehicles et cetera can make?
Mr Pendlebury: That is a good and fair question because we put a lot of effort into road safety public information and we have increasingly done so in conjunction with our partners in other government departments around climate change through Act on CO2. There is some information as part of the Act on CO2 campaign about emissions performance and I think the Vehicle Certification Agency's database is providing information that the public can access about the emissions standards in particular cars. What we have not had is a public information campaign akin to the road safety campaign and that is something that one night one to give thought to. Obviously local authorities, where they have declared air quality management areas because they have local air quality problems will provide information on their website, through newsletters and so forth and we would very much encourage best practice in that kind of area. When one talks to local authorities and local authority officers in particular it is an issue that does not get much traction with both local politicians and with the public generally. It only tends to be when there is some media story running - poisonous fumes in your high street - that this ever gets much attention. That is a problem with this area I think.
Q130 Mr Caton: How should local authorities take the health effects of poor air quality into account when they are producing their local transport plans?
Mr Pendlebury: There are a number of things they can do. Obviously first of all they need to
understand the nature of the air quality problem in their area insofar as there
is one. Then there are a number of
things they can do. They need to first
of all get into a good dialogue with other bodies who are responsible such as
the Highways Agency because we sometimes find, for example, the Highways Agency
role is one of the principal sources in a particular area so it is important
for both the Highways Agency and local authorities to look at what they can do
jointly on those areas. There are policy
instruments that local authorities should be considering, some of those will be
ones that have multiple benefits so the whole drive towards more sustainable
travel options, whether it be around cycling or greater encouragement to walk
and so forth. Those are the sorts of
policies that will have air quality benefits.
Ultimately, there are other sorts of policy instruments that are
potentially available to local authorities, of which low emission zones, of
which we have one in
Q131 Mr Caton: You do provide guidance I know; are these sorts of things covered in that guidance?
Mr Forbes: It is important to note that the recent guidance that the Department put out on local transport plans strongly encouraged local authorities to integrate air quality action plans with the local transport planning process and actually the new round should simplify that by allowing the timescales to be aligned and also gave quite clear direction to Defra guidance on local air quality management which describes some of the measures that Graham Pendlebury went through.
Q132 Mr Caton: Do you advise local authorities on how to measure the costs of both health impacts and environmental impacts?
Mr Forbes: Defra provide extensive guidance on local air quality management including how best to monitor air quality in their area and appropriate measures they might want to take to develop action plans to help address air quality problems.
Q133 Chairman: Given the range of policy options available to local authorities, why do you think more are not using them?
Mr Pendlebury: That is a question you might want to put to them and no doubt you will be doing. I think obviously all of these measures, even some of these quite low cost ones, do have costs associated with them. There are both compliance costs for transport operators who are affected if you are introducing things like low emission zones; there are issues around what is locally publicly acceptable. They will tend to find that the things people are complaining about are the fact that there is not enough parking provision or they are worried about potholes and things like that, very legitimate things. So even though there are responsibilities on local authorities under the existing statutory regime, it is just not always a locally high priority issue. This may come back to some extent to the question about the extent of public knowledge and awareness. I do not want to blame local authorities; I appreciate they have very difficult competing objectives.
Q134 Chairman: In the light of that would it be helpful if we had a national framework for low emission zones, for example in the way that I believe the Netherlands and Germany do?
Mr Pendlebury: I think the national framework for low emissions, certainly the
Germans have gone down that route. That
primarily relates to particulates rather than to NOx. The problem we really have in
Mr Forbes: I think to underline the points you are making, we are actively
looking at the experience in
Mr Pendlebury: I was over in
Q135 Chairman: Are you saying that the main barrier for preventing Britain going further down this road is a lack of resource?
Mr Pendlebury: I walked into that! Just throwing money at the problem is not necessarily the solution. Clearly there are resource implications from setting up something like LEZs both in the local authorities themselves, in terms of our agencies who actually have to provide data and so forth, and depending on what kind of system you apply - the Germans have gone for quite a simple coloured disc approach whereas in London TfL have gone for the technology heavy congestion charge - all of the systems have got significant resource implications. Ultimately is always a question of how you prioritise.
Mr Forbes: If low emission zones were to take in buses we would want to be very clear on what impact that might have on bus patronage. We talked earlier about the pressures that local authorities are under with regard to their relationship with bus operators.
Q136 Martin Horwood: In terms of retrofitting - it has been said to us again and again that the existing stock of vehicles is part of the problem - has DfT considered any incentives to retrofit things like particulate traps and other measures like that?
Mr Pendlebury: Retrofitting is another of those areas we are often asked about. We used to have a scheme known as a clean-up programme which ran from 2000 to 2005 which was offering grants for retrofitting commercial vehicles with emissions controlled technologies and in the end that programme was scrapped in 2006 because the assessment of it suggested it was not delivering a value-for-money outcome. We have had it in the past.
Q137 Martin Horwood: I had no idea about that scheme, despite the fact that I drive a car.
Mr Pendlebury: It was actually aimed at commercial vehicles rather than the individual consumer. It was more about clean-up.
Mr Parkin: It was a programme offering grants for retrofitting heavy goods vehicles and buses with particulate reduction technology or particulate plus NOx reduction technology.
Q138 Martin Horwood: What was the take-up of that scheme?
Mr Parkin: I do not have any data on that, I am afraid.
Mr Pendlebury: It was administered by the Energy Savings Trust on behalf of the
Department so I am sure we could get some data about the take-up. Retrofitting generally - again I am conscious
that there is a programme that has just started in
Q139 Martin Horwood: Without having to work out a complicated system, could you just incentivise it by looking at VED?
Mr Pendlebury: You would expect me to say that VED is a matter for the Treasury rather than for the Department. VED at the moment, if you are looking at cars, is obviously calibrated according to CO2 rather than NOx or PM10 and if you tried to build in some sort of incentive there you are starting to complicate the system very significantly. I think it is not something that has really been considered. Ultimately I would have to say that my friends in the Treasury would probably be in the lead on that but it is not something we would particularly push for. VED for us is good at getting low CO2 incentives in place but clearly it has wider purposes as well.
Mr Parkin: There is perhaps a distinction here between VED for passenger cars and VED for commercial vehicles. The Department and Treasury have previously, through the reduced pollution certificate scheme, offered lower levels of vehicle excise duty for commercial vehicles if they comply early with future Euro standards. Indeed the Treasury announced in 2009 that they planned to incentivise the early uptake of Euro 6 heavy duty vehicles through that same mechanism.
Q140 Martin Horwood: You told me in an earlier answer that you had a unit which is promoting the uptake of very low carbon technology.
Mr Pendlebury: That is right, the Office for Low Emission Vehicles, OLEV as it is known.
Q141 Martin Horwood: Have there been any significant successes so far?
Mr Pendlebury: The significant success from our point of view that we obtained from the Treasury £260 million to add to our existing package of funding.
Q142 Martin Horwood: Congratulations, but I was rather thinking about actual outcomes.
Mr Pendlebury: The mission of OLEV is to stimulate the uptake of ultra low carbon
vehicles, new technology vehicles, not existing technologies but actually
transformational technologies. We have
been working with manufacturers and a variety of other stakeholders to design a
consumer incentive scheme which will come into effect sooner rather than later. I am not in a position to make an
announcement about that, but I think there will be a forthcoming announcement
very shortly about when this scheme will start.
Obviously at the moment we are not looking at conventional types like
the Prius, we are looking at new types of vehicle altogether which are not sort
of milk float vehicles but real cars that you and I might drive. We want to get those into the market
place. We will be designing a consumer
incentive. We have said that we will be
giving between £2,000 and £5,000 per vehicle as a grant to the ordinary driver
to take up these vehicles. There is
also, as part of this, something we are calling "plugged in places" which is
getting some infrastructure in place in certain locations and again we will be
making some announcements about that fairly soon as well. It is quite early days, but what is really
good about this organisation is that it is a genuinely inter-department body as
officials from
Q143 Chairman: Thank you very much for that; it has been a very helpful session from our point of view. We are grateful to you for coming in.
Mr Pendlebury: Thank you.